ConWeb Hypocrites Defend Limbaugh Topic: The ConWeb
Rush Limbaugh is in trouble again -- well, actually, he just wants to buy a pro football franchise -- and you know what that means: The ConWeb is running to his rescue, defending him no matter what (just like before), and despite their own hypocrisy.
The issue this time is racially charged quotes attributed to Limbaugh which are apparently not what he actually said. Unsurprisingly, the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell was quick to attack:
“CNN and MSNBC must immediately and publicly source when Limbaugh uttered this phrase. He has unequivocally denied it. Now it is up to the same news media that reported it as fact to prove that it was, indeed, stated.
“The MRC has overnighted letters to senior executives at both cable networks demanding that they take this sourcing seriously and report back to the public. We await their word.
“Either Rush Limbaugh is lying or these networks – willfully or not – are participants in the worst form of character assassination imaginable. They can prove their innocence by documenting this accusation. If they can’t, then they are 100% guilty of character assassination.
“Tomorrow we will go public with their response.”
The hypocrisy here is that it took the MRC nine years to admit that it stitched quotes together out of a book by New York Times editor Howell Raines to falsely accuse Raines of smearing Ronald Reagan. It has yet to apologize or correct its out-of-context misrepresentation of a Boston Globe profile of Ted Kennedy.
Similarly, an Oct. 13 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling highlighting Limbaugh's "scathing attack of news reporters today for publicizing racist-sounding remarks he never made – and he's demanding retractions and apologies from every journalist who repeated the 'libelous' statements."
The problem? By that same standard, WND has repeatedly committed libel against President Obama, refusing to correct the numerousfalseclaims it has made about him and his policies.
Just another day in the pot-kettle-black world of the ConWeb.
New Article: The ConWeb's Obama Speech Freak-Out Topic: The ConWeb
Putting hatred before the facts, ConWeb writers baselessly assumed that President Obama would indoctrinate students -- despite the fact that the speech's theme of encouragement was made clear from the beginning. Read more >>
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, we detailed how the first instinct of the ConWeb was to blame them on President Clinton and to defend President Bush.
Newsmax to the latter to an extreme by asserting: "The president has been eloquent. He has been confident. Real Americans support him 100 percent."
Obama's Uncontroversial Speech Doesn't Stop the Crazy Train Topic: The ConWeb
President Obama's speech is over, nothing controversial was in it, but the ConWeb crazytrain rolls on.
Brent Bozell's Sept. 8 column, appearing after the speech, condemned Obama's speech because, well, it was Obama:
Why is this controversial? What is more American than having her president addressing the young? Reagan did it. So did Bush. The problem is Obama and his administration. There is – always is – a political agenda.
The mission was not to educate, it was to indoctrinate.
Bozell went on to conflate criticism of the overreaction of right-wingers like him to Obama's speech to attacks on all criticism of Obama, then denounced the very idea of public education: "It’s not insane to wonder why our schools should be directed by the government to discuss how the Dear Leader is inspiring the young, and how the Dear Leader can be helped."
A Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily column by Dan L. White similarly attacks the idea of public education, claiming that it allows the governmnet to "control the minds of its citizens and thereby centralize power. And that's how Obama was able to give his speech to millions of captive young minds, subservient to the socialist institution, ready to be led by the master – because of the centralized school system." As if homeschooling -- the "decentralized, individualized and maximized" ideal White presents -- isn't about a similar attempt control the minds of children, this time by parents.
Meanwhile, the ConWeb sought to find partisan intent in Obama's speech where there wasn't any. A Sept. 8 WND article was headlined, "Prez injects politics into school speech," but the article pointed out that Obama "stayed carefully in the encouraging mode during the broadcast portion of the speech" but brought up health care reform in "a conversation with students." WND's headline writer is apparently unclear on the difference between a speech and a conversation.
A Sept. 9 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr similarly tried to find something wrong with this, expressing alarm that Obama "made a pitch for health care reform in a discussion with 40 freshmen." It wasn't until the 14th paragraph that Starr got around to mentioning that "Obama omitted any discussion of health care" during the broadcast speech.
The latest to board the crazy train that is the right-wingfreak-out over President Obama's upcoming speech to students:
A Sept. 4 Accuracy in Media column by Rita Kramer invokes the "Hitler Jugend," adding: "It's ridiculous to imagine Obama Youth, isn't it? Here? Once, in the beginning, it seemed ridiculous there too." Too bad for Kramer that Obama's not doing that.
Jeff Poor began his Sept. 3 MRC Culture & Media Institute column by invoking Obama's purported narcisissm: "His weekly address on health care Aug. 22 mentioned the word “I” eight times ... The week before when he talked about health care, he said “I” 12 times." Poor goes on to baselessly denounce Obama's speech as "indoctrination" and that it "should serve as a larger reminder that this kind of manipulation of young people occurs every day in America at the hands of the NEA." Poor adds: "Conservatives of all stripes – social conservatives, libertarians, Christian conservatives and more – all need to unify to stop government from manipulating our young people." If any manipulating is to be done, Poor seems to be saying, it's conservatives who should be doing it.
Meanwhile, Bob Unruh hides a partisan agenda in a Sept. 5 article highlighting the claims of the right-wing Liberty counsel and its founder, Mathew Staver, that Obama's speech is illegal. Unruh describes Staver as "A lawyer whose work has included myriad civil rights disputes and who has practice before the U.S. Supreme Court ," refusing to accurately identify Staver's right-wing, anti-Obama agenda.
Kramer, Poor and Unruh all fail to mention that both Presidents Bush gave speeches to students or issued teaching materials, as did Ronald Reagan.
ConWeb Embaces Attack on Kennedy, Don't Consider the Source Topic: The ConWeb
WorldNetDaily, NewsBusters and NewsReal have all uncritically repeated a claim made by author Edward Klein on a radio show that Ted Kennedy purportedly enjoyed jokes about Chappaquiddick.
Klein, as we'vedetailed, is the author of a 2005 book on Hillary Clinton filled with errors and distortions -- and whose claims the ConWeb, particularly Newsmax, similarly promoted without acknowledging those errors.
ConWebWatch On the Air (In Germany) Topic: The ConWeb
On Thursday, we did a radio interview with Danny Antonelli, an American expatriate who does a radio show in Hamburg, Germany called "Free Wheel." Click on the media player below to listen (interview begins around 19:37).
The rest of the show is worth a listen as well -- an eclectic mix of music, information, comedy and fiction readings:
Jeffrey managed to discredit himself by following up his false assertion with the actual quote from Pelosi and Hoyer -- "Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American"-- which is clearly not what Jeffrey, Johnson and Gainor claimed they wrote.
Johnson, Jeffrey and Gainor are just thelatest in the ConWeb to lie about the Pelosi-Hoyer op-ed.
ConWeb Misleads on Mirandizing Detainees Topic: The ConWeb
A June 10 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling regurgitates a Weekly Standard report claiming "the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee." Since Schilling made no apparent effort to verify anything on her own, she has written an article that is dubious at best.
By contrast, the Washington Independent quoted Gen. David Petraeus as saying, "The real rumor yesterday is whether our forces were reading Miranda rights to detainees and the answer to that is no." And the Washington Post's Greg Sargent contacted a Justice Department spokesman, who said: "There has been no policy change and nor blanket instruction issued for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas. While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees."
In other words, if there is indeed a policy to Mirandize detainees, it appears to have begun in the Bush administration. Indeed, the author of that Weekly Standard report, Stephen Hayes, said himself that "There are reports that this was happening on specific bases as going back as early as July 2008."'
The rest of the ConWeb behaved only slightly better on this story, reporting the claim but not the full truth.
A June 11 Newsmax article by Dave Eberhart repeats the claim and includes the Justice Department statement, but Eberhart ignores Hayes' statement that the Mirandizing began under the Bush administration.
David Limbaugh, in a June 12 column that appears at WorldNetDaily and Newsmax, asserted that "There are reports that [Obama's] Justice Department has quietly ordered the FBI to give Miranda warnings to enemy combatants captured at war in Afghanistan" without noting reports that it apparently started under the Bush administration.
Rich Galen, in his June 12 CNSNews.com column, also repeated the claim without noting that it apparently started under the Bush administration.
New Article: The Insta-Conspiracy Topic: The ConWeb
The ConWeb quickly latched onto a right-wing claim that Chrysler dealers losing their franchises were disproportionately Republican -- a claim that was just as quickly debunked. But they're too invested in the conspiracy to honestly report the truth. Read more >>
ConWeb Loath to Report Randall Terry's Remarks on Tiller Topic: The ConWeb
On May 31, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry made this statement about the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller:
"Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer.
"I grieve for him that he did not have an opportunity to properly prepare his soul to face his Maker. Unless some miracle happened, he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered. Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done.
"I believe George Tiller was one of the most evil men on the planet; every bit as vile as the Nazi war criminals who were hunted down, tried, and sentenced after they participated in the 'legal' murder of the Jews that fell into their hands.
But if you read the ConWeb, you likely wouldn't know about it.
WorldNetDaily -- despite giving space last month to Terry's attacks on Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to speak and quoting him as claiming he's battling "the evil of people dying under Obama's orders" -- has failed to quote Terry's response to Tiller's death in twoarticles that feature, in the words of one article, "many pro-life voices condemning the murder."
Similarly, in a June 1 CNSNews.com article asserting that 'Pro-life groups say murder is incompatible with their beliefs, and they are condemning the shooting death of Kansas abortionist George Tiller," writer Susan Jones makes no mention of Terry's remark. Like WND, CNSpromoted Terry's anti-Obama campaign over Obama's Notre Dame speech
Only Newsmax among the ConWeb has reported Terry's remarks.
UPDATE: Anti-abortion "news" website LifeNews.com -- which we've previously noted has a vested interest in portraying Tiller's alleged killer as a rogue vigilante and anti-abortion groups as universally denouncing the shooting -- has also yet to mention Terry's remarks, even though he is a seminal figure in the anti-abortion movement and, like the rest of the tongue-tied ConWeb, it touted Terry's Notre Dame protests.
ConWeb Touts Dubious Abortion Poll Topic: The ConWeb
The ConWeb is unsurprisingly rushing to embrace a new Gallup poll portraying a major shift on abortion -- those who identified themselves as "pro-life" jumped from 44 percent in 2008 to 51 percent this year, while those who identified themselves as "pro-choice" declined from 50 percent in 2008 to 42 percent this year.
NewsBusters' Tom Blumer declared in a May 15 post, "What a difference a radical, in your face, abortion-promoting president makes," citing examples of "Obama's appalling abortion-supporting record" and asserting that "the ascendance of Dear Leader Barack Obama has unmasked what being 'pro-choice' on abortion is all about."
WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, cited an "analyst" -- in fact, someone from Concerned Women for America, which opposes abortion and thus cannot be counted on to offer anything resembling objective "analysis" -- similarly assertd that the numbers are "a reaction to the realization what a true "pro-choice" position means to President Barack Obama." Newsmax gave lead-story play to an Associated Press article on the poll.
But the sharp year-to-year swing -- particularly on an issue that has seen few sharp swings in Gallup polling -- may indicate a problem with the poll. As Media Matters' Jamison Foser noted:
Gallup says the large swing from a year ago is attributable entirely to a 10-percentage-point increase in Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who call themselves pro-life. But that 10-point increase can only result in the overall swing Gallup claims has occurred if more people are Republican or lean Republican today than a year ago. That's possible, but is inconsistent with other polling that shows fewer Americans than ever consider themselves Republicans. Until Gallup releases the full data, its press release shouldn't be taken particularly seriously.
Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore at FiveThirtyEight.com adds:
After eight years of constant excitement among right-to-lifers about getting that fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, that prospect is now pretty distant. And instead, Americans have been exposed to a constant wailing of alarms about Obama being "the most pro-abortion president in history," determined, somehow, to expand abortion rights. That Republicans and Republican-leaning independents might polarize on the subject isn't terribly surprising or necessarily significant.
Of course, since the poll has numbers they can get behind, the ConWeb will continue to take it quite seriously.
